The American presence in Basra during the World War Era, and under the British colonial umbrella, was tangible in commerce and education. The most concrete manifestation of this presence was the Arabian Mission (an American protestant missionary organization), represented by its schools: the School of High Hope for boys and the School of Women’s Hope for girls in and around Basra. During the first twenty years of the schools’ operation (1912-1932), both schools were tailored toward elite Arabs, and both were successful in maintaining steady enrolment numbers. In addition, the two founders of the schools, John Van Ess and Dorothy Van Ess, gained influence of a kind and extent not generally available to foreign missionaries. However, with the great transformation in Iraq’s political life and the formation of the new state, foreign schools, including High Hope, lost their appeal and were viewed as an imperial tool. Nevertheless, John Van Ess continued to influence Iraqi education’s demography, funding, and pedagogy through his extended relations with the power brokers in the region. The Van Esses, after the nationalization of the Iraqi education system in the 1930s, focused their efforts toward a neglected class of the society. They established evening classes, clubs, and literacy courses in deprived rural settlements around Basra. While American missionary literature praises the effort of Van Ess and considers his involvement in the national education system his legacy, Iraqi nationalists and historians belittle it and consider him an imperialist figure. This paper seeks to provide a balanced analysis of Van Ess, the schools he established, and the subsequent influence of both on education in Iraq. It consults a variety of sources--some of which have not been studied closely--that yield a mix of perspectives on the American missionary and his contribution. Furthermore, the paper highlights an early chapter of the American-Iraqi affairs that is often neglected or buried under the plethora of literature on British-Iraqi relations.

In recent years, historiography has started dealing with Arabic radio transmissions in the Middle East during the interwar period. For example, Andrea L. Stanton, Jeffrey Herf, Rebecca Scales have worked on Radio Jerusalem, Radio Berlin and radios in Algeria. At the same time, other studies have been produced on radios transmitting in Arabic in the Mediterranean sea, such as Radio Cairo and Radio Bari. Generally speaking, articles and books published on these topics have mainly addressed the ‘emission’ side, without taking too much into consideration the ‘reception’ side, i.e. the public listening to radio transmissions. This paper intends to focus on the impact that Arabic programs, transmitted by European Radios, had on the audience, by investigating to what extent is it possible to evaluate that impact through sources that are available to historians. Is local press useful to assess whether radio transmissions were followed and appreciated by the audience? And, in that case, does that mean that radio propaganda had an impact on the people who were listening to (and eventually appreciating) those transmissions? Would diplomatic sources and private memories be more helpful? The first type of sources would actually risk to focus only on the ‘emission’ side’s perception. As Marshall McLuhan stated, media are ‘metaphors’, which do not only carry the message, but also transform it. Yet, diplomatic accounts would non take this transformation into consideration. At the same time, private memories (such as the famous Al-Sakakini diary) would risk to shed light only on upper class or intellectuals, without considering the vast audience of illiterates, who were listening to radio in cafes and who were actually the main target of radios. By drawing on surveys and reports carried out and prepared by the BBC in the late 1930s and early 1940s concerning the Arabic transmissions of Radio Bari and Radio Daventry, and by combining them with articles published on Arabic press all over the Middle East and Diplomatic reports (from British, American, French and Italian archives), this paper aims at addressing the methodological issue of how to evaluate the impact of radio transmissions on the Arab audience, taking into consideration the radio programs Orientalist approach which was employed in order to meet what was considered the ‘Arab taste’.

With the inauguration of the Mandate rule, the British hoped to advance changes that would help constitute "the rule of law"; uproot local despotism and promote equity and justice for all. The legal sphere was, therefore, a main "battleground" for this purpose, while law was perceived by many British bureaucrats as a central tool to achieve social change. This lecture will concentrate on the legal sphere and on criminal law in particular, analyzing the ways in which colonial subjects confronted their changing environment with the move from the Ottoman to the British rule. The main focus will be attributed to criminal intent, scrutinizing the ways in which different legal players imbued it with different meanings and understanding. In stark contrast with the Shar‘i law, which played a pivotal role in the lives of Muslim local residents in Palestine prior to the British occupation, and in which intent was used only as a mechanism to deliberate the severity of punishment after a person was found guilty, intent was the main theme in criminal trials under the Mandate. This was part and parcel of the British understanding of criminal law, where intent was used as the most important element to prove the existence of mens rea, or in its English translation "the guilty mind" of an accused person. Under the context of transition, I put the spotlight on the Arab lawyer ‘Awni ‘Abd al-Hadi and the ways he sought to approach the tensions rising in trials deliberated under the supervision of English bureaucrats inclined to judge according to the rationale of the Common Law. I will use the court records of the murder of Solomon Rubin (a Jew murdered by three Arabs in Jerusalem on November 2, 1921 – the fourth anniversary of the Balfour Declaration) as a case study, analyzing the unique and linguistically-anchored understanding ‘Abd al-Hadi gives to criminal intent in his defense of the accused. While this was an integral part of his attempt to win the case for his client, it was also his way to negotiate the meaning and translation of legal concepts into the colonial setting of Mandate Palestine, adapting British legal concepts into the legal culture of local residents.

Research on the connection between sport and social transformation in the Middle East has been lacking; from a historiographical standpoint, sport in the British colonial period of Egypt has been virtually ignored. My paper addresses this lacuna by investigating the period between the mid-1930s and the early-1950s, where Egypt’s sporting infrastructure transitioned from a model administered by foreign interests into one that promulgated nationalist aims. By analyzing official reports of the National Committee of Sport and popular journals such as Egyptian Sports, I argue that, in conjunction with contemporary political trends, sport played a critical role in the mobilization and success of the 1952 Revolution. Adapting John Hargreaves’ theory that power is the outcome of constantly contested discourses and strategies, and that sport is one of the most prominent realms in which these contests play out, I argue that Britain began a period of “hegemonic restructuring” in mid-1930s Egypt. While this was most noticeable in the political sphere with the signing of the 1936 Anglo-Egyptian Treaty, it was facilitated at a popular level by changes in the realm of sports, where indigenous Egyptians desired more “access”, both in the literal sense of being eligible for membership in foreign clubs and the metaphorical sense of controlling the ideological discourses that surrounded sport. Foreign elites, meanwhile, wanted to maintain hegemony over these kinds of access. Thus, just as the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty granted Egyptians little more than nominal independence, foreign powers were only willing to permit superficially indigenous gestures towards nationalism in sport in order to earn mass support. This process was drawn out by World War II and interrupted by the outbreak of the 1952 Revolution, which led to the expulsion of foreign elites and allowed indigenous actors to take control of sport and government. The nation transitioned successfully from foreign-domination to a nationalistic model because the Revolution allowed indigenous groups to take the reins during a critical period of hegemonic flux and adaptation. In explaining how sports institutions endured, I conclude that in July 1952, sport facilitated and inspired the militant release of simmering political tensions.

This paper explores the intersection of memory, conflict, and the nation-state in Transjordan. Beginning in April 1921, a conflict between local tribesmen and the Mandate government’s military representatives flared up in the region of al-Kura, located in the environs of ‘Ajlun and Irbid in what is now the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. Dozens of government troops were killed. The soldiers who survived the clash, surrendered, disbanded, and deserted the army, leaving the government defenseless. By June 1922, after several skirmishes, the Mandate government with British air support subdued the tribes. Despite the liminal nature of the events, the al-Kura Incident was an important turning point for the region as it entered the post-World War I era when the geography and destiny of the region were internationally and regionally contested. As a contested site, various memories have formed to understand this event and its implications for the future of the Mandate. Thus, with collective memory as its focus, this paper analyzes these resulting memories--British, Hashemite, and even tribal--that are situated within a specific historical moment. This project intervenes in the traditional historiography, however, by introducing and examining the memory of an exiled Syrian Arab Nationalist, Khayr al-Din al-Zirkali (1893-1976), whose extensive account of the al-Kura Incident was forgotten in favor of the colonial and proto-nationalist remembered histories. In contrast to these memories, al-Zirkali’s account locates the event within a specific regional moment—the transition from an Ottoman system to the Mandate system—when the future of the region was still nebulous and contested. While the colonial archives offer a simple account of the event, later memoirs provide a historical narrative of the Incident that highlight its significance to the formation of the Transjordanian state. By examining the history of the Incident from the perspective of collective memory, this paper attempts to explore the unique formation of the tribal, nationalist, and colonial memories, and how they relate to the historical narrative. Such a memory study as presented by this paper provides a glimpse into a specific regional moment and how the memories of a conflict--taking place within a contested space--affect the formation and development of a state, In doing so, the paper reveals how the memory of a State is an ongoing and contested site of analysis.